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The St. John Fisher College Irish Studies Program presents a lecture by Kate Costello-Sullivan, Associate Professor of English at Le Moyne College.

"Demons gone out": The Magdalene Laundries and the Haunting of the Irish Cultural Imagination

This talk explores the phenomenon of the Magdalene laundries and how imperialism, religion, and colonialism set the conditions for their evolution. In particular, the speaker will consider how Catholic constructions of sexuality, English imperial constructions of Irishness, and Irish postcolonial responses to their oppression combined to create the fatal conditions which allowed this cultural phenomenon to occur. Drawing on both the foundational work of James Smith in his award-winning study, Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment, and on the recent Peter Mullen film, "The Magdalene Sisters," she will suggest that nation-building and Irish cultural tendencies toward silence combined to permit such a dark period in Irish history to arise.

Kate Costello-Sullivan is an Associate Professor of Modern Irish Literature at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY, where she also founded and directs the Irish Literature minor program. She has published articles and book chapters on Emily Lawless, Rudyard Kipling, Maria Edgeworth, Molly Keane, and Colm Tóibín, among others, and is author of Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín (March 2012). Her edition of Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla is forthcoming from Syracuse University Press (March 2013). She is currently working on a study of Trauma and Narrative in the contemporary Irish novel.

Free and open to the Public. For further information, please contact Tim Madigan, Director of the Irish Studies Program at tmadigan@sjfc.edu.